Dispatches from the Memory Hole

Yet another video of Obama's rise to power has surfaced, this one from 2002. Obviously, no goodthinking person would even consider viewing it on his telescreen, lest he repeat the doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime he's already on file with in the Ministry of Truth for watching last night's video.

In the 2002 speech, Obama tells his audience, "You know, the principle of empathy gives broader meaning, by the way, to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff." (Plus more comments bashing the suburbs.) Regarding this speech, before being sent to Minitrue for intensive questioning in Room 101, Power Line's Scott Johnson wrote:

Now this was a speech on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day, and Obama does not directly criticize King. But he limits the applicability of King’s philosophy (or strategy) in a manner that takes it to the vanishing point.

It seems to me that the spirit of Obama’s remarks here is more in keeping with Malcolm X’s vehement critique of King (as can be heard, for example, in this video) than with that of King himself. There is a gulf between Obama and King that opens up over King’s persistent appeal to the principles of the American founding and Obama’s alienation from them.

The dog that didn’t bark on March 18, 2008, was that the crucial words “all men are created equal” do not appear in Obama’s carefully composed speech. And so that “already classic address,” as James Kloppenberg calls it, on a topic that Obama declared he’d been thinking about for twenty years, constitutes a very different kind of argument, with a very different view of America, than one finds in, say, Martin Luther King’s great speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. Obama invokes neither Jefferson nor Lincoln. He refers to the Constitution briefly, noting its “ideal of equal citizenship” and that it “promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” But he doesn’t mention the conclusion that he had announced in his book, namely, that the Declaration’s and the Constitution’s “people” did not include blacks, and especially not black slaves.

In short, Obama regards the original intention of both the Declaration and the Constitution to be racist and even pro-slavery. But he refrains from making the point explicit because it would confirm the Reverend Wright’s fundamental charge, that the United States is a racist country. And the point of the speech in Philadelphia, at the National Constitution Center, close by Independence Hall, the scene of the great events of 1776 and 1787, was not merely to repeat his condemnation of Wright’s remarks “in unequivocal terms” but to put the whole controversy behind him, without dwelling on his fundamental agreement with Wright’s interpretation of American principles.

How else do you explain a statement like “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned business, in our neighborhoods”? [emphasis mine]

That is not what most of us had in mind when we were involved in the civil rights movement. Naïve us. Our intention was that everyone should get to live wherever they wanted, even those suburbs. They were open to all. Forget ghettoes and barrios. Equality, brother, equality. How did that old Babs Gonzales song go — “We got a New Frontier, a man in the moon, but we ain’t got integration”?

Oh well, integration was a nice idea once upon a time, but to Barack Obama in 2007 it was already seriously outdated, if it ever had any value. And why should it? An integrated society is not easily broken off into equally easily manipulated interest groups like African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans.

Segregation pays — at the ballot box.

It is also one of the fastest and most reliable routes to power.

Now I’m not trying to say that Obama is a segregationist like Orville Faubus or even a cheap race hustler like Sharpton. He is something different and obviously more complex and subtle, but in the final analysis he relies on the same reactionary racial estrangement as the other two.

Indeed, our president is the reverse of what he appears to be, pretending to bring the races together when he profits by driving them apart. In that sense, he is similar to Yasser Arafat, talking one way to the West and another to his Palestinian brothers.

Obama's attacks on the suburbs and the "us vs. them" rhetoric that toxifies the entire speech helps make sense of his divisive presidency and campaign. Moreover, the speech that made Obama a national star was his 2004 address at the Democratic Convention where he was famously unifying and post-racial. That was his "no red states, no blue states" speech.